From: Bob Lefsetz <bob@lefsetz.com>
Date: May 5, 2014 at 10:06:33 PM EDT
To: yes@therainbow.com
Subject: The Prayer Decision
Reply-To: Bob Lefsetz <bob@lefsetz.com>

I said the Lord's Prayer.

One of the great disillusionments of my adulthood is the rejection of sixties values.

Oh, you remember the sixties, wherein the younger generation questioned everything "the establishment" stood for and we ended up with women's rights, abortion and "Sgt. Pepper," and some people are still pissed about it.

"Question authority." That was one of the precepts of the age.

But today it's all about authority, unless you're in tech, wherein you create products the boomers in power can't understand and when they finally do, you're on to the next thing.

"Love your brother." What would John Lennon say today? Would he follow music titans like Bono and Justin Timberlake into tech investing or would he refuse to get with the program and continue to rail about injustice?

Injustice is for pussies.

Scalping was a distant threat, something almost never encountered in the sixties. You lined up for tickets and you got what was left.

Now scalping is institutionalized, with StubHub and the appearance of secondary market tickets on Ticketmaster. What next, am I gonna have to pay a scalper for food and rent? Are we devolving into Russia, where payoffs rule the country and the top 1% rule everything?

Sure we should be worried about Putin's incursion into Ukraine, but even more we should question ourselves, as we fight for truth, justice and the American Way as we throw our principles out the window, with incarcerated people left uncharged, never mind tried.

And now comes this prayer decision.

How did we get here?

The Federalist Society. Look it up. It was a concerted effort by the right wing to infiltrate the judiciary.

And Republican Presidents... Who nominated men to the Supreme Court whose whole ethos seems to be to undercut the sixties.

Prayer at public meetings in public places constitutionally protected?

It seems like comic books have taken over not only the movies, but real life, for we're now living in Bizarroland.

Once upon a time I was a little boy. I was in the first grade. We pledged allegiance and we said a prayer. I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW IT WAS A CHRISTIAN ONE!

"Our daily bread?"

I had no idea what that meant, but I repeated it until the Supreme Court said school prayer was unconstitutional.

But now under the guise of "freedom," of lawlessness in a land where crime is decreasing, the rights of the accused have been undercut and we kill our prisoners and black men overpopulate prisons and I wonder if our country is going in the right direction.

We do not live in a Christian nation. The founding fathers were Deists. We rail against religious-run Mideast nations and then we approve of religion in our own institutions...what makes us any better!

Where does it stop, what gets your blood boiling, where do you make a stand?

Once upon a time we had the draft, it was easy to protest an unjust war because you were afraid of getting killed, but now you can't question United States military involvement because you're not supporting the troops, you're not supporting our country...USA, USA! But if your ass was on the line...

And now you can't get abortion, even though the unwanted no longer have the safety net they once did, because everybody should be an individual who never makes a bad choice and is able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Even though religious leaders get caught with their private parts in the wrong place all the time and so many anti-abortion crusaders have had one.

And climate change can't be addressed because the world's gonna end anyway, that's what it says in the Bible. And business must be protected at all costs, because the .1% are our deities, creating jobs and raining down cash and opportunity on the rest of us.

Wrong.

But that's our nation, where money trumps everything, even though most people haven't got any.

But do you expect the nation to embrace the concept of consumer spending, acknowledging it drives the country, when taxes are evil and if you lose a tire in a pothole it's your fault?

I'm Jewish. And if you don't think there's anti-semitism in our nation, you're not.

And there are atheists and Muslims and Baha'is and all kinds of practitioners. But now we're all secondary to the Christians, because prayer is benign and we live in a religious country.

But that's bulldoody.

So I'm making a stand here.

Because your rights are being taken away every day.

And no one's standing up for you, no one with any power.

The politicians are owned by the corporations.

And the musicians are too.

All say their hands are tied, this is the way they do business.

And they're afraid of alienating anybody with any power.

Wars have been fought over religion. Our nation was founded upon a different principle.

But those days are through.

Along with the questioning values I grew up with.

So just line up behind people who played the game better than you did, who are richer and better connected than you are, who have your best interests at heart.

Dust off your record player, folks. Today is Bob Seger's 69th birthday. This singer-songwriter has been rocking out since the early 60s and earned himself a spot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame back in 2004, not to mention an induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame two years ago.

I love great art, no matter the medium.